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Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

blakewatson.com

271–280 of 388 posts

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#271
post #268
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws. Oh dear. That is definitely not correct. The only way for omg.lol to not fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR is to not offer their services to people living where it applies.

And how would the owner go about that? Implement expensive geo-fences and KYC processes for a market they are not interested in? If they (EU people) want to use it .. they should be able to without expecting the same protections as if the business operates in EEA. How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick your middle finger because you have laws in yo…

I'll include the mandatory ianal, but they could even ask people to indemnify them, or put up a banner saying: you must be in the US, blah-blah. But they're straight up saying: don't care about your laws. That seems untenable.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#272
post #268
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws. Oh dear. That is definitely not correct. The only way for omg.lol to not fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR is to not offer their services to people living where it applies.

And how would the owner go about that? Implement expensive geo-fences and KYC processes for a market they are not interested in? If they (EU people) want to use it .. they should be able to without expecting the same protections as if the business operates in EEA. How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick your middle finger because you have laws in yo…

Hangon, if go to another country I most certainly have to follow the laws that apply there.

If I surf over to another (Internet surfing) country because the server is physically located in that country, I again am forced to follow the laws that apply there.

It does seem illogical to have such setup especially since physical I haven't moved.

Now it seems that I can take my laws with me when I visit a server in another country. Making everything even more confusing.

Unfortunately that does not apply to physically traveling to another country: that country doesn't care two bobs for my countries laws.

Edit: INAL.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#273
post #268
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws. Oh dear. That is definitely not correct. The only way for omg.lol to not fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR is to not offer their services to people living where it applies.

And how would the owner go about that? Implement expensive geo-fences and KYC processes for a market they are not interested in? If they (EU people) want to use it .. they should be able to without expecting the same protections as if the business operates in EEA. How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick your middle finger because you have laws in yo…

The easiest and most reasonable option would be to honor GDPR and similar laws.

If you scam people in country A from country B, you're criminally liable to country A even if it's not a crime in country B. Same if it's espionage (cf. Assange), piracy (cf. TPB) and so on. Why should infringing on privacy rights be any different?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#275

It takes blog posts to discover these because Mastodon micro communities aren't discoverable and no one knows which ones to sign up for. Mastodon has no long term potential. We're still waiting for the Twitter replacement.

Maybe the Nostr protocol and all its implementations (that do talk with each other) are the true replacement for Twitter?

Check out some trending people/topics on Nostr here: https://nostr.band/

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#276
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without taking into account the time investment in maintaining your own infra, it compares favorably with everything else. Even the most dirt-cheap VPS is a few bucks more expensive on a yearly basis by itself, and you still have to buy domains and similar. Running your own infra only really works out if you either have access to great hardware for super-cheap or WANT the experience from setting everything up.

It consistently surprises me how much software engineers devalue the effort of software engineering when it comes to their personal lives. If you're a SWE in an English-speaking country, you almost certainly make $20 post-tax for at most one hour of work - 30m at SV salaries, as little as 15m if you're at a FAANG-ish company. Is it conceivable that you would spend less than an hour a year maintaining something like t…

Didn't you know that everyone on HN bakes their own bread?

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Section 6.3 We may share personal information in connection with a corporate transaction, like a merger or sale of our company, the sale of most of our assets, or a bankruptcy. >Section 6.5 Except where explicitly stated to the contrary in this Policy, in some cases, particularly given the limited amount and type of information and data collected through omg.lol, we have not restricted contractors’ own use or discl…

Also not a lawyer, but that sounds more like "if another company acquires us, we will give your info to them" and then separately "Stripe might sell your data; we're not responsible for them". Which is rotally reasonable/expected imho.

No, that's not totally reasonable and expected. Change of control can be a valid reason for breaking open a previous arrangement, especially when that change of control negates the exact reason why people would join this to begin with.

After all, if your data can be transferred at will to another entity due to a change of ownership and the agreement you made can then be annulled (because the new owners don't care about your privacy as much as the previous ones) then that's an end-run around the whole principle.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Section 8.6 GDPR > Part b. omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws. That's a hard disclaimer if there's any. I read that as: if you're a European user, we do not believe you can legally enforce us to honor your rights, even though we operate within the EEA.

This is very disappointing, and automatically dismisses omg.lol as an option for me as a researcher and educator.

And is illegal to boot. If that's their attitude they should not allow Europeans to register in the first place because all it will do is set them up for a confrontation with the various Data Privacy Offices. And such wilful language rules out any apologies.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#279
post #268
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>omg.lol does not believe its processing of limited personal data of those outside the United States (if any) brings it within the jurisdiction of these laws. Oh dear. That is definitely not correct. The only way for omg.lol to not fall under the jurisdiction of the GDPR is to not offer their services to people living where it applies.

And how would the owner go about that? Implement expensive geo-fences and KYC processes for a market they are not interested in? If they (EU people) want to use it .. they should be able to without expecting the same protections as if the business operates in EEA. How did we get here? To where If I spin up a webserver and charge for access now I'm suddenly forced to lick your middle finger because you have laws in yo…

That's not really that interesting of a question, if the owner wants to give the finger to the laws of a region with 300+ million people in it then that's their right, how they go about doing that in a way that it doesn't translate into liability (rather than simply respecting the law with regards to EU subjects) is not something that we need to solve for them. The choice is theirs, so are the consequences.

Re: Omg.lol: An Oasis on the Internet

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God. "Freedom of speech" and "free of abuse?" Sounds like a nightmare! Liberals!! Where are the spaces anymore to be outlandishly an asshole and shut other people down?! :-|

The thing is, what counts as "abuse" has considerably changed. There seems to be a shift towards, how someone perceives something, not how something actually is. That can mean, that it is no longer possible to speak about something unpleasant, as someone might consider that an insult - and that is then the opposite of freedom of speech. In other words, I don't enjoy the assholeness of 4chan - but I also do not enjoy…

Exactly this. It's worth pointing out how many comedians* have argued the dangers of today's "getting offended" culture. Not because they are 4chaners or far-right extremists, they certainly aren't, but because they appreciate the negative consequences it has for society.

* Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais to mention some of the most outspoken.

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